Question: How can one even discuss changing or improving the situation when to even bring it up for discussion is like lighting the beacon for every misogynistic prick to roll in with their usually woefully uninformed opinions?

Well, even worst-case scenario, it is arguably (1) a chance to communicate, build bridges, and engage in dialogue in order to develop more informed opinions, and (2) in the case of thoroughgoing misogynists, it shows what sorts of emotions and knee-jerk reactions get raised by the issue.

(And if someone is really being a total jerk, there is always the ignore button.)

Question: How, then, would you propose to change or improve the situation?

Starve / stress people out? Going back to the standard of beauty images, notice "when" twiggy emerged as the "style for beauty?" the 1960s. Right after western culture had a nice 10 year recovery break from wars. During the wars, the standard of beauty was definitely not thin. A very, realistic woman indeed. I speculate, as well as many other influential individuals on the issue, that the reason we prefer such thin women at this point is that we have such a food and obesity abundance. Therefor, being able to access food/ being obese is no longer the indicator of success it used to be, and therefor not as attractive as it once was.

It's just genetically imprinted on us almost to "find" certain standards of beauty attractive, and that wont' change ever. Men will always tend towards symmetrical faces since non symmetrical faces are usually indicators of genetic faults and deleterious recessives (or better put, MUTANT BABY I mean.. -unhealthy-) and symmetrical ones aren't. Or strong Chins indicate "good immune system." High Cheek bones tend towards less aggression.. and well, you get the picture. People pick the ideal beauty standard unconsciously usually based on surrounding circumstances, and that won't change.

What you could do to get women to stop killing themselves with these unrealistic ideals of thin.. is get a healthier population. I can't say with anything other than correlation, but the models keep getting thinner and thinner.. as the population gets heavier and heavier.

Look at the CDC fast stats for the average American woman (it's pretty bad for the average man too.. =( ) over 20...
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/bodymeas.htm
Barely over 5 feet tall (63.8 inches)
and she weighs 164.7 pounds.
I'm also going to put my bottom buck on the fact the the majority of these are poor, below average intelligence (Due to terrible public school systems), women who can't afford to take the steps needed to live a healthy life. So when another girl sees a skinny girl, she probably unconsciously thinks the same thing that the girl in the 1600s thought when she saw a fat woman, "I wish I could afford to be like that... (especially if she sees the price of a salad today!)" and then idealizes it to the point of an exaggerated proportion.

I think if you really wanted to change the damage women are doing to other women through the media, photoshop, all that... you'd have to approach things like a good democrat would to jobless rates. Improve education and change the subsidization scheme for certain products (mainly food...)_________________Warning: Nothing is without influence.

Question: How, then, would you propose to change or improve the situation?

I'll give you the question you SHOULD be asking.

Question: How can one even discuss changing or improving the situation when to even bring it up for discussion is like lighting the beacon for every misogynistic prick to roll in with their usually woefully uninformed opinions?

When should worry of poor opinions negate you from considering any opinion?

I think every person is an idiot for a good number of reasons to at least 75% of the population, it just depends on who was already predisposed to agree with you on (X) number of subjects before you started talking.

If someone came up and the first words out of their mouth was "war is awesome! Let's go rape and pillage some towns!" I'd think "wow that guy is a retard..." no matter how eloquently or scientifically or politely he made his argument.

If the guy had agreed with me previously on.. like.. almost everything else? then I'd think "Hmmm.. well... you can't win them all, at least he is smart enough to think (... Put in random thought I agreed with him on here).. even if his argument was really retarded. I'd just be momentarily frustrated with his ignorance on -1- subject instead of considering him a retard on all subjects.

Just saying, you may think the misogynist pricks of the world are all awful because of how they interpret one situation, but they might have a somewhat.. maybe? decent opinion on other issues.
Some of those awful misogynistic pricks (As you described them) may be pushing for gay marriage and trying to convince people to wear condoms in the south eastern part of the united states.. lol. Just saying._________________Warning: Nothing is without influence.

are you ADD or something? you seem to have a hard time actually sticking with what it is we're talking about.

you keep claiming that "people pick standards of beauty," as if there's some kind of rational decisionmaking process where people sit down with a big list of different body images and pick the one they want to internalize. except now you're saying that it's done unconsciously--and it is!--except if it's done unconsciously you don't really get to say it's a choice. and if it's done unconsciously you don't really get to just blame women for perpetuating harmful body images.

and you still haven't addressed the point that you are just ignoring the role that socialization plays. you keep just claiming that it's all supply and demand and women are the ones to blame in all this, as though if you say it the right number of times it'll be true.

to say nothing of all the other just plain bizarre things you said in that post. the answer to perpetuation of harmful body images is food? wtf?

your opinion certainly is not worth considering if you're just going to ignore major parts of the issue.

Speaking as a seasoned troll.....it doesn't really take much to completely derail a discussion.

Especially on these forums. Hell, you're lucky if it stays on topic past HALF of the first page.

Also, ANYONE, anyone anyone anyone anyone anyone who actually uses the the words "lol. Just saying." is basically admitting that everything they said prior was just them talking out their ass._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

... I think that there's more to it than just thinness, honestly--and what about attitudes toward women, body image issues and the like before Twiggy? It's not like this is some sort of issue that's only been around since the 1960s, after all. Heck, C.S. Lewis -- whom many people would not consider to be especially feminist -- raises a lot of the same issues twenty years earlier (1941-42) in his excellent Screwtape Letters, which are letters from one devil to another on the art of temptation:

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In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.

Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.

As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium.

At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach.

It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist—making the rôle of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!
---------

And this was written before Photoshop allowed for far more than pinching and propping, before the pervasive media expanded "the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers" to an unimaginable degree compared with the 1940s, and the like.

Question: How, then, would you propose to change or improve the situation?

I'll give you the question you SHOULD be asking.

Question: How can one even discuss changing or improving the situation when to even bring it up for discussion is like lighting the beacon for every misogynistic prick to roll in with their usually woefully uninformed opinions?

When should worry of poor opinions negate you from considering any opinion?

I think every person is an idiot for a good number of reasons to at least 75% of the population, it just depends on who was already predisposed to agree with you on (X) number of subjects before you started talking.

If someone came up and the first words out of their mouth was "war is awesome! Let's go rape and pillage some towns!" I'd think "wow that guy is a retard..." no matter how eloquently or scientifically or politely he made his argument.

If the guy had agreed with me previously on.. like.. almost everything else? then I'd think "Hmmm.. well... you can't win them all, at least he is smart enough to think (... Put in random thought I agreed with him on here).. even if his argument was really retarded. I'd just be momentarily frustrated with his ignorance on -1- subject instead of considering him a retard on all subjects.

Just saying, you may think the misogynist pricks of the world are all awful because of how they interpret one situation, but they might have a somewhat.. maybe? decent opinion on other issues.
Some of those awful misogynistic pricks (As you described them) may be pushing for gay marriage and trying to convince people to wear condoms in the south eastern part of the united states.. lol. Just saying.

Who the fuck addressed you?

You only get one chance to make a first impression, and you blew it. Nothing I post beyond this one will ever be addressed to you, it will not be posted with an intention that you comment on it, nor will I ever choose to actively engage you beyond this one post where I inform you that you are for all intents and purposes dead to me, and a deep dark ugly part of me kind of wishes you were dead in truth, because fuck, there are 7 billion people on this planet and the value of the life of some jackoff from the internet I don't want to and likely will never meet is worth approximately the same to me as what you'd get on the open market for rendering their body down to its constituent elements and selling those wholesale. So just do me a favour and crawl over to the corner with TragicallyUnhip, and Guest, and the rest of them and save your quote button for someone who might care to have a discussion with you, because that ain't me.

I'm not going to say that with the start of the 1900s we didn't see a push towards "thinness" when I say that Twiggy was the start of a new trend. I'm saying that she marked the push towards a ridiculously unattainable slimness.
It wasn't really until 1959 that playboy pushed the "thinner and thinner" mark, and you saw Miss America winners get thinner (which implies that originally the ideal woman wasn't as thin at the beginning as she was at the end).
Drastic changes towards more boyish women I mean, he talks about "boyish women" certainly one can mark that the 1920s-1940s was definitely flatter than the 1950s. But you did see that rebound in the 1950s (Maybe I'd argue the push for non curvy ended with Merilyn Monroe) on chest size until twiggy hit again.

Either way, my point was it is something that social situations and beliefs on what is "healthy" both have huge influence on the characters we choose to exaggerate to ridiculous proportions. The pinching, photoshop.. those are just there to help us erase things because we'd rather look at a perfectly symmetrical woman than one that isn't. We'd rather look at a size 0 than a size 2.... but it's still our ignorance that pushes us to thinking a size 0 is awesome or some guy with 2% body fat is healthy._________________Warning: Nothing is without influence.

Yeah, I'm baffled by that too. I mean, sure, notions of health play a part in body image issues, but those notions don't just appear, and the whole socialization issue is just a tad relevant to how those notions get perpetuated.